Enhancement of Opioid-Mediated Analgesia\ud by Ingestion of Amniotic Fluid:\ud Onset Latency and Duration

Ingestion of placenta and amniotic fluid has been shown to enhance opioid-mediated analgesia produced by morphine injection, footshock, vaginal/cervical stimulation, and during late pregnancy in rats. The present study was designed to determine how soon after ingestion the enhancement begins and how long it lasts. Tail-flick latencies in Long-Evans rats were determined before and during vaginal/cervical stimulation; analgesia was measured as the percent increase in tail-flick latency during vaginal stimulation. After determination of baseline, rats were intubated with 0.25 ml of either amniotic fluid or beef bouillon. We found that analgesia enhancement was detectable as early as 5 minutes after ingestion of amniotic fluid, and the effect lasted at least 30 minutes, but no longer than 40 minutes

Amniotic-Fluid Ingestion Enhances\ud Morphine Analgesia During Morphine\ud Tolerance and Withdrawal in Rats

Ingestion of placenta and amniotic fluid has been shown to enhance opioid-mediated analgesia in rats produced by morphine injection. footshock, vaginal/cervical stimulation, and during late pregnancy. The present study was designed to investigate the effects of amniotic fluid ingestion on the characteristics of morphine dependency and withdrawal. Tail-flick latencies in Long-Evans rats were determined before and after repeated daily injections of morphine sulfate. It was found that ingestion of amniotic fluid after establishment of the morphine dependency, coupled with an injection of an otherwise ineffective dose of morphine, enhanced analgesia in morphine-dependent rats, and reversed hyperalgesia seen during withdrawal from morphine dependency

Ingested bovine amniotic fluid enhances morphine antinociception in rats

Ingestion by rats of rat placenta or amniotic fluid enhances opioid-mediated, or partly opioid-mediated, antinociception produced by morphine injection, vaginal or cervical stimulation, late pregnancy, and foot shock. This phenomenon is believed to be produced by a placental\ud opioid-enhancing factor (POEF). Ingestion by rats of human or dolphin placenta has also been shown to enhance opioid antinociception, suggesting that POEF may be common to many mammalian species. We tested bovine amniotic fluid (BAF) for its capacity to enhance morphine antinociception in female Long-Evans rats, as determined by percentage change from baseline tail-flick latency in response to radiant heat, and we report that 0.50 mL BAF effectively enhanced morphine antinociception but did not by itself produce antinociception. The efficacy of POEF across species suggests that POEF may have been functionally (and structurally) conserved during evolution. Furthermore, the availability of POEF at parturition, as well as its ability to enhance pregnancy-mediated antinociception without\ud disrupting maternal behavior, offers a tenable explanation for the long-debated ultimate causality of placentophagia

Solitonic spin-liquid state due to the violation of the Lifshitz condition in Fe1+y_{1+y}Te

A combination of phenomenological analysis and M\"ossbauer spectroscopy experiments on the tetragonal Fe$_{1+y}$Te system indicates that the magnetic ordering transition in compounds with higher Fe-excess, $y\ge$ 0.11, is unconventional. Experimentally, a liquid-like magnetic precursor with quasi-static spin-order is found from significantly broadened M\"ossbauer spectra at temperatures above the antiferromagnetic transition. The incommensurate spin-density wave (SDW) order in Fe$_{1+y}$Te is described by a magnetic free energy that violates the weak Lifshitz condition in the Landau theory of second-order transitions. The presence of multiple Lifshitz invariants provides the mechanism to create multidimensional, twisted, and modulated solitonic phases.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figure

Effect of Particle Size on Droplet Infiltration into Hydrophobic Porous Media As a Model of Water Repellent Soil

The wettability of soil is of great importance for plants and soil biota, and in determining the risk for preferential flow, surface runoff, flooding,and soil erosion. The molarity of ethanol droplet (MED) test is widely used for quantifying the severity of water repellency in soils that show reduced wettability and is assumed to be independent of soil particle size. The minimum ethanol concentration at which droplet penetration occurs within a short time (≤10 s) provides an estimate of the initial advancing contact angle at which spontaneous wetting is expected. In this study, we test the assumption of particle size independence using a simple model of soil, represented by layers of small (0.2–2 mm) diameter beads that predict the effect of changing bead radius in the top layer on capillary driven imbibition. Experimental results using a three-layer bead system show broad agreement with the model and demonstrate a dependence of the MED test on particle size. The results show that the critical initial advancing contact angle for penetration can be considerably less than 90° and varies with particle size, demonstrating that a key assumption currently used in the MED testing of soil is not necessarily valid

ArCo: the Italian Cultural Heritage Knowledge Graph

ArCo is the Italian Cultural Heritage knowledge graph, consisting of a network of seven vocabularies and 169 million triples about 820 thousand cultural entities. It is distributed jointly with a SPARQL endpoint, a software for converting catalogue records to RDF, and a rich suite of documentation material (testing, evaluation, how-to, examples, etc.). ArCo is based on the official General Catalogue of the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities (MiBAC) - and its associated encoding regulations - which collects and validates the catalogue records of (ideally) all Italian Cultural Heritage properties (excluding libraries and archives), contributed by CH administrators from all over Italy. We present its structure, design methods and tools, its growing community, and delineate its importance, quality, and impact

OntoMathPROOntoMath^{PRO} Ontology: A Linked Data Hub for Mathematics

In this paper, we present an ontology of mathematical knowledge concepts that covers a wide range of the fields of mathematics and introduces a balanced representation between comprehensive and sensible models. We demonstrate the applications of this representation in information extraction, semantic search, and education. We argue that the ontology can be a core of future integration of math-aware data sets in the Web of Data and, therefore, provide mappings onto relevant datasets, such as DBpedia and ScienceWISE.Comment: 15 pages, 6 images, 1 table, Knowledge Engineering and the Semantic Web - 5th International Conferenc